The umbrella company running Bitfinex and Tether, iFinex, has been hit with a $1 trillion class-action lawsuit.
Plaintiffs say that the actions of iFinex was “part fraud, part pump-and-dump and part money-laundering.”
“Together, Bitfinex and Tether manipulated a market that, by design, is supposed to be decentralized,” states the lawsuit.
The filing comes days after the company revealed that it was expecting a lawsuit to be filed against it.
“In advance of any filing, we want to make clear our position that any claims based on these insinuations are meritless, reckless and a shameless attempt at a money grab. Accordingly, Tether will vigorously defend itself in any such action,” the company wrote, according to Crypto Vest.
In other news, $10 billion worth of bitcoin — or almost 7 percent — is currently held in the wallets of eight major cryptocurrency exchanges.
Coin Telegraph reported that Token Analyst found that almost 1.2 million coins are held in the wallets of the eight major exchanges, which are described as “the biggest HODLers.”
QuadrigaCX Founder Gerald Cotten wasn’t as wealthy as many assumed at the time of his death.
Court filings show that Cotten and his wife Jennifer Robertson “incurred significant personal, living and travel-related expenses” before his death last year, Bloomberg reported. The couple didn’t have any sources of income other than funds received from Quadriga. Cotten didn’t file personal tax returns for 2014, 2015 or 2017 and his 2016 return didn’t report any income from Quadriga, and Robertson’s tax returns from 2015 and 2016 showed income of less than C$60,000 a year, while in 2017 there was income of less than C$5,000 — but none of it from Quadriga.
In addition, Cotten sometimes transferred “significant amounts of fiat currency directed to Mr. Cotten personally and used to fund personal expenses and the purchase of personal assets. In other instances, transfers were made directly to Ms. Robertson and used to pay personal expenses and purchase personal assets in her name or the name of companies which Ms. Robertson controlled.”
Robertson recently agreed to return about C$12 million of assets to Quadriga as part of a settlement.
And the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) announced that they have signed an operational agreement on the BIS Innovation Hub Centre in Switzerland.
The Hub will start working on two projects: The first will study the integration of digital central bank money into a distributed ledger technology infrastructure; while the second will look into the additional requirements placed on central banks to track and monitor electronic markets.
“The SNB has for some time been closely following the digitalisation of the financial sector and technological innovations in the areas covered by its mandate. Through the cooperation at the BIS Innovation Hub Centre in Switzerland, the SNB will be able to further expand its expertise in the area of financial markets and their infrastructures. We look forward to bolstering our collaboration with the BIS and other central banks in this space,” Thomas J. Jordan, chairman of the governing board of the SNB, said in a press release.
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